Posts Tagged ‘journal’

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In 2011/12, Richard Perrin and his Locked Door Puzzle studio brought us the enigmatic and fascinating Kairo. Journal is utterly dissimilar – a minimalist adventure game about teenage life and loss, driven by conversation choices rather than puzzles or inventories. As RPS’s oldest teenager, here’s wot I think:

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Journal is the latest game from Richard Perrin, creator of brilliant abstract puzzle/madness-fest Kairo. It’s also absolutely nothing like Kairo – at least, on a surface level. Journal is the story of a young girl lost in a temple of trials that’s perhaps even more desolately lonely than Kairo’s cavernous halls: growing up. It’s an adventure about human relationships, but even with that in mind, Perrin’s main inspiration for it is anything but expected. Last year, he lost his father. The week Kairo launched, his world fell apart.

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Journal screams intrigue. Not physically, of course. That wouldn’t make for a particularly fun game and would also be existentially horrifying. It does, however, have quite a few tantalizing highlights nestled within its crisp, comfortingly musty pages. For one, Kairo creator Richard Perrin’s on dev duty, but this time around, he’s eschewing gloriously abstract puzzles in favor of the most stultifying brain-bender of them all: human relationships. The adventure, whose story is being penned by Melissa Royall, is about “the difficulties and responsibilities of childhood.” A game starring children who aren’t on a quest to save the world from whomever burned down their village and might be an allegory for the Christian incarnation of god? Will wonders never cease?